The Devil and Miss Prym Read online

  “When he had finished, the beggar, who had sobered up slightly, opened his eyes and saw the picture before him. With a mixture of horror and sadness he said:

  “‘I’ve seen that picture before!’

  “‘When?’ asked an astonished Leonardo.

  “‘Three years ago, before I lost everything I had, at a time when I used to sing in a choir and my life was full of dreams. The artist asked me to pose as the model for the face of Jesus.’”

  There was a long pause. The stranger was looking at the priest, who was drinking his beer, but Chantal knew his words were directed at her.

  “So you see, Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being.”

  He got up, made his excuses, saying he was tired, and went up to his room. Everyone paid what they owed and slowly left the bar, casting a last look at the cheap reproduction of the famous painting, asking themselves at what point in their lives they had been touched by an angel or a devil. Without anyone saying a word to anyone else, each came to the conclusion that this had only happened in Viscos before Ahab brought peace to the region; now, every day was like every other day, each the same as the last.

  Exhausted, functioning almost like an automaton, Chantal knew she was the only person to think differently, for she alone had felt the heavy, seductive hand of Evil caressing her cheek. “Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being.” Beautiful, possibly true words, but all she really needed now was to sleep, nothing more.

  She ended up giving the wrong change to one of the customers, something which almost never happened; she apologized, but did not feel overly guilty. She carried on, inscrutable and dignified, until the priest and the local mayor—generally the last to leave—had departed. Then she shut up the till, gathered her things together, put on her cheap, heavy jacket and went home, just as she had done for years.

  On the third night, then, she found herself in the presence of Evil. And Evil came to her in the form of extreme tiredness and a soaring fever, leaving her in a half-conscious state, but incapable of sleep—while outside in the darkness, a wolf kept howling. Sometimes she thought she must be delirious, for it seemed the wolf had come into her room and was talking to her in a language she couldn’t understand. In a brief moment of lucidity, she attempted to get up and go to the church, to ask the priest to call a doctor because she was ill, very ill; but when she tried to convert her intentions into actions, her legs gave way beneath her, and she was convinced she would be unable to walk.

  Or, if she did manage to walk, she would be unable to reach the church.

  Or, if she did reach the church, she would have to wait for the priest to wake up, get dressed and open the door, and meanwhile the cold would cause her fever to rise so rapidly that she would drop dead on the spot, right there outside the house that some considered to be sacred.

  “At least they wouldn’t have far to take me to the cemetery: I’d be virtually inside it already,” she thought.

  Chantal’s delirium lasted all night, but she noticed that her fever began to diminish as the morning light came filtering into her room. As her strength returned and she was trying to get to sleep, she heard the familiar sound of a car horn and realized that the baker’s van had arrived in Viscos and that it must be time for breakfast.

  There was no one there to make her go downstairs to buy bread; she was independent, she could stay in bed for as long as she wanted, since she only began work in the evening. But something had changed in her; she needed contact with the world, before she went completely mad. She wanted to be with the people she knew would now be gathering around the little green van, exchanging their coins for bread, happy because a new day was beginning and they had work to do and food to eat.

  She went across to the van, greeting them all, and heard one or two remarks like: “You look tired” or “Is anything wrong?” They were kind and supportive, always ready to help, simple and innocent in their generosity, while her soul was engaged in a bitter struggle for dreams and adventures, fear and power. Much as she would have liked to share her secret, she knew that if she revealed it to a single one of them, the rest of the village would be sure to know it before the morning was over. It was better to thank them for their concern and to carry on alone until her ideas had become a little clearer.

  “No, it’s nothing. There was a wolf howling all night and I couldn’t get to sleep.”

  “I didn’t hear any wolf,” said the hotel landlady, who was also there buying bread.

  “It’s been months since any wolves were heard in the area,” confirmed another woman who made conserves to be sold in the hotel shop. “The hunters must have killed them all, which is bad news for us because the wolves are the main reason the hunters come up here at all, to see who can kill the most elusive animal in the pack. It’s a pretty pointless exercise, but they love it.”

  “Don’t say anything in front of the baker about there being no more wolves in the region,” muttered Chantal’s boss. “If word gets out, no one will come to Viscos at all.”

  “But I heard a wolf.”

  “Then it must have been the rogue wolf,” said the mayor’s wife, who didn’t much like Chantal, but who was sufficiently well-bred to hide her feelings.

  The hotel landlady got annoyed. There was no rogue wolf. It was just an ordinary wolf, and it was probably dead by now anyway.

  The mayor’s wife, however, would not give up so easily.

  “Regardless of whether or not it exists, we all know that there were no wolves howling last night. You work the poor girl too hard, up until all hours; she’s so exhausted she’s starting to get hallucinations.”

  Chantal left the pair of them to their argument, picked up her bread and went on her way.

  “A pointless exercise,” she repeated to herself, recalling the comment made by the woman who made the conserves. That was how they viewed life, as a pointless exercise. She nearly told them about the stranger’s proposal there and then, just to see if those smug, narrow-minded people would be willing to take part in a genuinely purposeful exercise: ten gold bars in exchange for a simple murder, one that would guarantee the futures of their children and their grandchildren and return Viscos to its former glory, with or without wolves.

  But she held back. She decided instead to tell the story that very night, in front of everyone, in the bar, so that no one could claim not to have heard or understood. Perhaps they would fall on the stranger and march him straight to the police, leaving her free to take her gold bar as a reward for services rendered to the community. Perhaps they simply wouldn’t believe her, and the stranger would depart believing that they were all good, which wasn’t the case at all.

  They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that didn’t fit in with what they were used to believing. They all lived in fear of God. They were all—herself included—cowards when the moment comes to change their fate. But as far as true goodness was concerned, that didn’t exist—not in the land of cowardly men, nor in the heaven of Almighty God who sows suffering everywhere, just so that we can spend our whole lives begging him to deliver us from Evil.

  The temperature had dropped. Chantal hadn’t slept for three nights, but once she was preparing her breakfast, she felt much better. She wasn’t the only coward, though she was possibly the only one aware of her own cowardice, because the rest of them thought of life as a “pointless exercise” and confused fear with generosity.

  She remembered a man who used to work in a chemist’s in a nearby village and who had been dismissed after twenty years’ service. He hadn’t asked for his redundancy money because—so he said—he considered his employers to be his friends and didn’t want to hurt them, because he knew they had had to dismiss him because of financial difficulties. It was all a lie: the reason the man did not go to court was because he was a coward; he wanted at all costs to be
liked; he thought his employers would then always think of him as a generous, friendly sort. Some time later, when he went back to them to ask for a loan, they slammed the door in his face, but by then it was too late, for he had signed a letter of resignation and could make no further demands of them.

  Very clever. Playing the part of a charitable soul was only for those who were afraid of taking a stand in life. It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others and fight for your rights. It is always easier to hear an insult and not retaliate than have the courage to fight back against someone stronger than yourself; we can always say we’re not hurt by the stones others throw at us, and it’s only at night—when we’re alone and our wife or our husband or our school friend is asleep—that we can silently grieve over our own cowardice.

  Chantal drank her coffee and hoped the day would pass quickly. She would destroy the village, she would bring Viscos to its knees that very night. The village would die within a generation anyway because it was a village without children—young people had their children elsewhere, in places where people went to parties, wore fine clothes, traveled and engaged in “pointless exercises.”

  The day, however, did not pass quickly. On the contrary, the grey weather and the low clouds made the hours drag. The mountains were obscured by mist, and the village seemed cut off from the world, turned in on itself, as if it were the only inhabited place on Earth. From her window, Chantal saw the stranger leave the hotel and, as usual, head for the mountains. She feared for her gold, but immediately calmed herself down—he was sure to come back because he had paid in advance for a week in the hotel, and rich men never waste a penny; only poor people do that.

  She tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. She decided to go for a walk around Viscos, and the only person she saw was Berta, the widow, who spent her days sitting outside her house, watching everything that went on.

  “It looks like it’s finally going to get cold,” said Berta.

  Chantal asked herself why people with nothing else to talk about always think the weather is so important. She nodded her agreement.

  Then she went on her way, since she had said all she had to say to Berta in the many years she had lived in that village. There was a time when she had considered Berta an interesting, courageous woman, who had managed to continue her life even after the death of her husband in one of the many hunting accidents that happened each year. She had sold some of her few possessions and invested the money—together with the insurance money—in securities, and she now lived off the income.

  Over time, however, the widow had ceased to be of interest to her, and had become instead an example of everything she feared she might become: ending her life sitting in a chair on her own doorstep, all muffled up in winter, staring at the only landscape she had ever known, watching over what didn’t need watching over, since nothing serious, important or valuable ever happened there.

  She walked on, unconcerned at the possibility of getting lost in the misty forest, because she knew every track, tree and stone by heart. She imagined how exciting things would be that night and tried out various ways of putting the stranger’s proposal—in some versions she simply told them what she had seen and heard, in others she spun a tale that might or might not be true, imitating the style of the man who had not let her sleep now for three nights.

  “A highly dangerous man, worse than any hunter I’ve ever met.”

  Walking through the woods, Chantal began to realize that she had discovered another person just as dangerous as the stranger: herself. Up until four days ago, she had been imperceptibly becoming used to who she was, to what she could realistically expect from life, to the fact that living in Viscos wasn’t really so bad—after all, the whole area was swamped with tourists in the summer, every one of whom referred to the place as a “paradise.”

  Now the monsters were emerging from their tombs, darkening her nights, making her feel discontented, put upon, abandoned by God and by fate. Worse than that, they forced her to acknowledge the bitterness she carried around inside her day and night, into the forest and to work, into those rare love affairs and during her many moments of solitude.

  “Damn the man. And damn myself too, since I was the one who made him cross my path.”

  As she made her way back to the village, she regretted every single minute of her life; she cursed her mother for dying so young, her grandmother for having taught her to be honest and kind, the friends who had abandoned her, and the fate that was still with her.

  Berta was still at her post.

  “You’re in a great hurry,” she said. “Why not sit down beside me and relax a bit?”

  Chantal did as she suggested. She would do anything to make the time pass more quickly.

  “The village seems to be changing,” Berta said. “There’s something different in the air, and last night I heard the rogue wolf howling.”

  The girl felt relieved. She didn’t know whether it had been the rogue wolf or not, but she had definitely heard a wolf howling that night, and at least one other person apart from her had heard it too.

  “This place never changes,” she replied. “Only the seasons come and go, and now it’s winter’s turn.”

  “No, it’s because the stranger has come.”

  Chantal checked herself. Could it be that he had talked to someone else as well?

  “What has the arrival of the stranger got to do with Viscos?”

  “I spend the whole day looking at nature. Some people think it’s a waste of time, but it was the only way I could find to accept the loss of someone I loved very much. I see the seasons pass, see the trees lose their leaves and then grow new ones. But occasionally something unexpected in nature brings about enormous changes. I’ve been told, for example, that the mountains all around us are the result of an earthquake that happened thousands of years ago.”

  Chantal nodded; she had learned the same thing at school.

  “After that, nothing is ever the same. I’m afraid that is precisely what is going to happen now.”

  Chantal was tempted to tell her the story of the gold, but, suspecting that the old woman might know something already, she said nothing.

  “I keep thinking about Ahab, our great hero and reformer, the man who was blessed by St. Savin.”

  “Why Ahab?”

  “Because he could see that even the most insignificant of actions, however well intentioned, can destroy everything. They say that after he had brought peace to the village, driven away the remaining outlaws, and modernized agriculture and trade in Viscos, he invited his friends to supper and cooked a succulent piece of meat for them. Suddenly he realized there was no salt.

  “So Ahab called to his son: ‘Go to the village and buy some salt, but pay a fair price for it: neither too much nor too little.’

  “His son was surprised: ‘I can understand why I shouldn’t pay too much for it, Father, but if I can bargain them down, why not pay a bit less?’

  “‘That would be the sensible thing to do in a big city, but in a small village like ours it could spell the beginning of the end.’

  “The boy left without asking any further questions. However, Ahab’s guests, who had overheard their conversation, wanted to know why they should not buy the salt more cheaply if they could. Ahab replied:

  “‘The only reason anyone would sell salt more cheaply than usual would be because he was desperate for money. And anyone who took advantage of that situation would be showing a lack of respect for the sweat and struggle of the man who labored to produce it.’

  “‘But such a small thing couldn’t possibly destroy a village.’

  “‘In the beginning, there was only a small amount of injustice abroad in the world, but everyone who came afterwards added their portion, always thinking it was very small and unimportant, and look where we have ended up today.’”

  “Like the stranger, for example,” Chantal said, hoping that Berta would confirm that she too had talke
d to him. But Berta said nothing.

  “I don’t know why Ahab was so keen to save Viscos,” Chantal went on. “It started out as a den of thieves and now it’s a village of cowards.”

  Chantal was sure the old woman knew something. She only had to find out whether it was the stranger himself who had told her.

  “That’s true. But I’m not sure that it’s cowardice exactly. I think everyone is afraid of change. They want Viscos to be as it always was: a place where you can till the soil and tend your livestock, a place that welcomes hunters and tourists, but where everyone knows exactly what is going to happen from one day to the next, and where the only unpredictable things are nature’s storms. Perhaps it’s a way of achieving peace, but I agree with you on one point: they all think they have everything under control, when, in fact, they control nothing.”

  “Absolutely,” said Chantal.

  “Not one jot or one tittle shall be added to what is written,” the old woman said, quoting from the Gospels. “But we like to live with that illusion because it makes us feel safe. Well, it’s a choice like any other, even though it’s stupid to believe we can control the world and to allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security that leaves us totally unprepared for life; because then, when you least expect it, an earthquake throws up a range of mountains, a bolt of lightning kills a tree that was preparing for its summer rebirth, or a hunting accident puts paid to the life of an honest man.”

  For the hundredth time, Berta launched into the story of her husband’s death. He had been one of the most respected guides in the region, a man who saw hunting not as a savage sport, but as a way of respecting local traditions. Thanks to him, Viscos had created a special nature reserve, the mayor had drawn up laws protecting certain near-extinct species, there was a tax per head of each animal killed, and the money collected was used for the good of the community.

  Berta’s husband tried to see the sport—considered cruel by some and traditional for others—as a way of teaching the hunters something about the art of living. Whenever someone with a lot of money but little hunting experience arrived in Viscos, he would take them out to a piece of waste ground. There, he would place a beer can on top of a stone.